Author Archives: Kate

Ever had someone link to your blog post from Facebook, only to see with dismay that the wrong image showed up? Or no image at all? Or even worse, that the excerpt for the article shows something completely unrelated? Ouch. Not very helpful.

Try these two WordPress plugins to help:

Facebook Like Send & Open Graph Meta adds Facebook Like and Send buttons at the base of each post on your website to make it easy for visitors to link your post on their Facebook timeline. It also adds meta information behind the scenes to tell Facebook which image to use when it grabs that link for display.

If you often post videos to your blog, you might prefer Fedmich’s Facebook Open Graph Meta. It doesn’t add the buttons to your site, but it includes a neat trick for video: the image on the Facebook excerpt is a clickable link to the video itself.

2012 brought a huge number of changes for me personally and for 2FishWeb. 2013 is shaping up to be really exciting. I can’t wait to share all the great changes with you.

Moving forward into 2013, I’ll be making weekly postings with a quick business or website tip and maybe a link to an article or two that I thought you might find interesting.

Biz Tips: Update your business info

– Check your website footer: Does the copyright date need to be changed to 2013? Make sure to change it, or (if you are hosted with 2FishWeb) send an email and I’ll make sure it’s done for you.

– The first of the year is a great time to update your bio and About page, too. Got a new head shot? Make sure to show it off! While you’re at it, don’t forget to update your profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or other social media sites. Sprint, not Marathon.

Let’s Get Moving

If you’re like most business owners (and me!), you go into your office in the morning, sit and work until lunchtime, eat quickly and get back to it all afternoon.

The human body was built to move. Try this instead and see if your productivity takes a jump: Set a timer for 60 to 90 minutes. Sit down, concentrate, and really work until the timer goes off. Then get up. Stretch. Take a walk, get a drink of water, move around for maybe 15 minutes. Go back to your work refreshed and ready to tackle the next segment of the day.

Try this for a week. I am. Next Monday we’ll compare notes and see how well it worked! Events

With two large dogs in the Newbill household, we go through a lot of dog food. Pet Food Direct has great prices and service, and best of all, they have an auto-ship service. I was able to sign up to have my girls’ regular food delivered every four weeks so I never have to worry about running out or making a last-minute run to the pet store.

Last week I noticed that the end-of-April shipment was overdue. I checked the UPS tracking number on my order status, to find out that it had been delivered April 30. “Left in garage,” it said.

Um… not my garage! Well, these things happen from time to time. We probably had a new driver on the route who got our address confused with another that’s very similar. (We swap mail frequently, those other homeowners and I.) But this time they didn’t have it.

I went to the pet store for an emergency supply and emailed Pet Food Direct that my shipment was feeding someone else’s fortunate pooches. They immediately sent a replacement order and said they would file an inquiry with UPS. The second shipment came, my doggie girls were fat and happy, and all was well in the world.

Usual procedure in customer service, right?

The extraordinary part comes next.

Last Saturday another neighbor brought the box over. The original shipment that had been left in his garage on April 30.

Oh, dear.

I emailed Pet Food Direct. (It was Saturday — I didn’t expect that anyone would be manning the phones and a reply on Monday would be fine). I explained what had happened, told them I would keep both shipments, but of course I needed to pay for the second one and could they please charge my card on file in my account?

In just a few minutes I had this response by email:

Thank you so very much for being such an upstanding & honest individual. I have spoken with my supervisor & please do keep the food. We will NOT be charging any additional amount to your account. Please keep the extra shipment with our compliments.

I was stunned.

They thanked me for doing what was simply the right thing? They were surprised that I planned to pay for both shipments? And then they gave me the better part of $75 in merchandise for doing that?

If you expect to get comments from visitors writing in other languages, of course, this might not be a good idea. But for normal blogging activity, especially if you prefer to leave comments open indefinitely, take a look at Jeff’s article and consider implementing his suggestions.

After I wrote that post, I considered calling the people who had bought the billboard ad and asking them — did it work? Did you get the website traffic, physical visitors, and increased sales you wanted from the mysterious billboard? What were your results?

One of our clients’ sites uses a shopping cart with real-time shipping calculations from the US Postal Service. The shipping module adds up the weight of the order and phones home to the USPS to ask how much it will cost, then displays the result to the customer prior to checkout.

Last November, the Postal Service announced that they were going to raise rates on January 22, 2012, add a number of new service classes to Priority Mail and change up the parcel classes. I knew from similar experiences in 2009 and 2010 that this would break the shipping module and shut down her shopping cart until the software company fixed it.

In mid-December I sent an inquiry to the software company explaining this potential problem, reminding them what happened the last two times, and asking if they would have a patch for the shipping prior to January 22. The company rep responded that “it would update itself” and there was no need to worry.

I was not so sure.

Yesterday this Tweet from Steve Plunkett in my stream caught my attention. At first glance, I wasn’t sure why, but I’ve learned to heed these nags — it means my subconscious is poking me. “Hey! Here’s something you need to know!”

At first glance, this implies that running at 90 miles per hour with a roadmap in mind is normal, that it’s desirable, that everyone should be doing it. Following the analogy, though: where can you run 90 miles per hour? In a speedboat on open water… in a racer on the Bonneville Salt Flats… in a fast car on a major highway where the land is wide open and there are no speed limits and no obstacles.

Either no obstructions, or else you are running wide open on a highway paved by someone else, going to the destination they have chosen.

Aha.

um... what?On Saturday, my husband and I drove to a city about an hour north of us. It was a lovely day and we enjoyed getting out for a bit.

Then I noticed the billboard. Oh, billboards are everywhere, and I’m pretty good at ignoring them. But this one was really strange.

A generic graphic: a leaf in the center of water ripples. Directions: “Take next exit, 2 miles on right.” And a website domain name.

That was all. No company name, no indication as to what the billboard was advertising. Just those three elements.

At first glance… huh?

Who in the world would spend somewhere around $2000 a month for such an ineffectual advertisement with limited reach? Are passersby really likely to zip off the next exit and drive two miles out of their way to see what in the world this thing was talking about?

But… it creates a sense of mystery, doesn’t it? A sense of curiosity. Now I wanted to know what the billboard was about, what company or place or thing it was advertising. I was driving at the time or I might have whipped out my smartphone and looked up the URL to find out.

Later, I did look up the URL. Unfortunately, the site is built in Flash so it wouldn’t work on my iPhone anyway. Note to website designers: if your target audience is mobile, it might be a good idea to make sure the site will work on mobile devices, don’t you think?

Creating curiosity = good.

Take this same idea and apply it to your own marketing. Can you create a sense of mystery, infuse your readers with the itch to explore and discover?

Publix, a chain of supermarkets headquartered in Florida, frequently runs an ad with a coupon for a “Mystery 1¢ Item.” The coupon is good only on Sunday. The item costs only one penny and you only get one at that price, but it’s always something good, something that most people would find worth trying. They use it to promote house brand products and sometimes to clear out overstocks, but you never know what it’s going to be. A package of bathroom tissue? a 5-pound bag of flour? pasta or rice or a half-gallon of milk? Hey, we need a loaf of bread anyway — why don’t we run by there and see what the one cent mystery is this week?

In your next newsletter or sale event on your website, why not offer a mystery item for a low price, perhaps with a minimum purchase? Use it to clear out a slow seller or offer a sample of something that your customers will want to come back for once they’ve tried it.

Sometimes, “what??” is exactly the response you want.

Once you have your WordPress blog up and running, you’ll naturally want to know how many people come to visit you. Google Analytics is the gold standard of statistical information, of course, but that means opening another browser tab or window and signing in to a separate service.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have your visitor statistics right in your WordPress dashboard?

You’re familiar with the usual search engine optimization advice: put keywords in your site and page titles and meta tags; make sure your page copy contains the words you want people to find in search. Those are good places to start, and you’re probably doing them already.

If you’re ready to do more to help your site be found, here are three less-obvious tips that you can quickly start utilizing on every new page you publish.Continue reading →